Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 7

Here are a few more comments about the short letter of Paul to Philemon, whose major themes and emphases I discussed yesterday.   It may indeed seem a rather perifpheral letter – it’s a private letter about a slave returning to his master, not about Paul’s great theological views or highly informative discussions of his life.  [...]

The post Philemon and the Morality of Slavery appeared first on The Bart Ehrman Blog.

I come now to the final Pauline letter of the New Testament, Philemon.  If you recall, Paul’s letters are ordered by length; this is by far the shortest, a real one-pager.  Given it’s brevity, I’ll be dealing with its major themes and emphases and the questions of Who, When and Why in just this one [...]

The post The Letter to Philemon in a Nutshell appeared first on The Bart Ehrman Blog.

Every time we receive four guest contributions from our Platinum members (available to Platinum members only), we open up the floor for Platinum members to vote on one to share with the entire blog community. It’s our way of spotlighting the thoughtful, high-quality work being done by members and inviting wider discussion. We recently caught [...]

The post The Evolution of Jewish Monotheism–Platinum Post By Daniel Kohanski appeared first on The Bart Ehrman Blog.

Here is another tidbit from the Hebrew Bible section of first edition of my textbook that covered Genesis to Revelation, book-by-book, now being edited for a third edition with Joel Baden. ****************************** Box 1.2: Woman Wisdom as God’s Consort? We have seen that in ancient Israel Yahweh was sometimes thought to have a [...]

The post Another Puzzling Figure in the Hebrew Bible: Woman Wisdom? appeared first on The Bart Ehrman Blog.

Here is another post on the Hebrew Bible from the blog in 2012, written while I was working on the first edition of my Bible Introduction.  It is an excerpt from my first rough draft of a discussion of an unusually important passage in the book of Isaiah. Brief context: at this point I was  [...]

The post Who Was the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53? appeared first on The Bart Ehrman Blog.

Here is another tidbit from the original version of my Bible Introduction.  It may be old news for a lot of you, but it's fun to write this kind of thing up for college students, who have never heard of such a thing! ****************************** One of the most mysterious and even bizarre stories in Genesis [...]

The post One of the Stranger Stories of Scripture appeared first on The Bart Ehrman Blog.

In my Bible Intro, I included a number of "boxes" that deal with issues that are somewhat tangential to the main discussion, but of related interest or importance. Here's one of the ones in my chapter on Genesis, in connection with interpretations that want to take the book as science or history. For a lot [...]

The post How We Know the World Was Created in 4004 BCE… appeared first on The Bart Ehrman Blog.

Would you like some help in understanding the Hebrew Bible?  I have two unofficial announcements to make (official ones are yet to come).  The first is that we are producing a third edition of my texbook:  The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction (Oxford University Press) which provides up-to-date scholarship on the entire Bible from Genesis [...]

The post Understanding the Hebrew Bible: The “Old” Testament in Modern Scholarship appeared first on The Bart Ehrman Blog.

“[T]hey went after the high priests. It was against them that the main rush was made, and they were soon caught and killed. The murderers, standing on their dead bodies, ridiculed Ananus..they threw out the dead bodies without burial.” (Josephus, “The Jewish War”) When the question arises whether early Jewish Christians participated in the First [...]

The post Acts of the Jewish Christians: Rethinking Their Role in the First Jewish-Roman War – Platinum Post by Rizwan Ahmed appeared first on The...

I'd like to conclude this thread on the Pastoral epistles by discussing at greater length the one passage that I think has done more damage than nearly any other.  It involves women in the church.  The story of women in the entire Bible is long and complex, but it starts in the beginning (Genesis 1-2) and [...]

The post My Least Favorite Passage of the Pastorals: Those Silent and Submissive Women…. appeared first on The Bart Ehrman Blog.